The pivot that saved Skillshare

I love learning from business and learning from how they grow. One of the companies I’ve watched over the years is Skillshare.

They started with in-person events which I thought would give them an advantage over all the similar businesses teaching online. But then they pivoted, which told me there may have been a challenge they faced by going offline.

Since pivoting they’ve grown and grown and grown and I want to find out how they did it.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the founder of Skillshare, an online learning community for creators.

Michael Karnjanaprakorn

Full Interview Transcript

Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.

One of the reasons why I started Mixergy is that I have a love for business. I love to see how startups start, how businesses grow, how entrepreneurs take ideas from their heads and turn them into reality. When I went to school, even when I took businesses classes, that passion just wasn’t satisfied enough. It was too much of the mundane, too much of the things that don’t really apply to life. I always had this vision that the stuff I like to study on my own would be accessible to me and I could study it in a more formal way and if school wasn’t the way, then someone needs to create that way.

Partially, I contributed to that using Mixergy, where we do interviews and courses. And partially, I’ve been watching other people do it. One of the companies that I’ve watched over the years do it really well is a company called Skillshare. They started out with these in-person events, which kind of reminded me like a more professional version of the Learning Annex—I’m looking at you, Michael, to see if you recognize that reference and if you’re smiling or pissed that I made it—which I thought had a really solid foundation and at times went a little bit off the rails depending on the kind of speakers and teachers they had.

I love that they started off with this in-person event, and I thought they’re going to actually separate themselves from the online pack by going in-person and not doing another online thing. And then they pivoted, which tells me there was a challenge in going offline. I’m curious about what that was. Since then, they’ve grown and grown and grown, and I’m curious about how they did that. I want to find out all about the business of Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learn community for creators. I’ve got the cofounder of the company with me.

His name is Michael Karnjanaprakorn—Michael Karnjanaprakorn. I told you I practiced it so much before we started, and then you and I had some tech issues and the practice went away. So Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the founder. He’s here to talk about it. This interview is sponsored by two great companies you’ve heard me talk about forever. The first one is going to help you close more sales. It’s called Pipedrive and the second will host your website right. It’s called HostGator. But first, Michael, welcome.

Michael: Thank you for having me.

Andrew: I’m curious about what your revenues are. What are you guys doing now?

Michael: Yeah. So maybe start with some of the [inaudible 00:02:24]. We’re about 3.5 million users. We have about 17,000 online classes, 5,000 teachers. And then we have over 100,000 subscribers, easily clearing over $11 million a month right now in recurring revenue.

Andrew: 100,000 subscribers, each paying like I am, $10 a month, and that gets you to $12 million a year?

Michael: Yeah. So it’s either users can pay us $15 a month or $100 for the year. So you can choose which pot you want to go into.

Andrew: Wait, isn’t it $10 a month?

Michael: No. We increased the price this year as we increase the value.

Andrew: So $15 a month.

Michael: Yeah. I guess it comes out like $8 and some change for a month if you pay up front for a year.

Andrew: Okay. That goes to show how much I pay attention to recurring fees and iTunes payments.

Michael: If you signed up before we increased the price, you’re still locked into the old rate.

Andrew: Now, you have tons of courses. How many courses do you now have on the site?

Michael: About 17,000 courses, mostly professional within creative, business, tech and lifestyle. It’s kind of our main four categories.

Andrew: And Michael, anyone can create a course. Do you share the revenue with the course creators?

Michael: It’s completely open. In that way, we’re similar to YouTube. We pay out royalties. We have a royalty pool. We take a percentage of our revenue on any given month into a royalty pool, and that gets distributed to all the teachers based on how many minutes are consumed by the students.

Andrew: I see. The people at Lynda.com years ago told me that was their model too, that they were taking a percentage. They even told me what the percentage was. I forget right now. They were private about it. They told me, “Andrew, we’re going to tell you so that you go into your interview with Lynda knowing this stuff, but you can’t mention it unless you research it and find it somewhere else. We just want you to prepared, but we can’t reveal it.” I don’t know why that was such a secret. But the model makes sense. What’s the percentage of the revenue that you guys split with the teachers?

Michael: Yeah. This is all public. So in averages anywhere between like 30% and 50% falls into that range.

Andrew: Okay. I’m curious about how you got here. I feel like you finally found your mojo, am I right, as a business?

Michael: Yeah. We definitely hit our stride. I’d say the flywheel of momentum is starting to pick up even more so than it has ever.

Andrew: Okay. I want to find out about what that flywheel is, but let’s go back a little bit and get to know you. You’re a guy who was born in Virginia, but you were raised where?

Michael: Born in Virginia, but raised in Korea. I moved back to Virginia when I was in middle school.

Andrew: Why were you raised in Korea?

Michael: So my dad was in the military, but I think part of the reason was just to raise us—I’m half Korean and my dad’s from Thailand. They kind of wanted to raise us in Asia so we can kind of see their culture and really get exposed to that side of the family.

Andrew: Most people think that entrepreneurship is this weird thing, that someone else can be a part of and it’s hard for them to open their eyes to the possibilities because they just hadn’t been exposed to it. It was always their boss or a friend or someone they read about who was an entrepreneur, never someone close to them. You had the opposite experience. Your family just kept being entrepreneurial. Talk about some of the businesses they started and you how you attempted to help them with those businesses?

Michael: Yeah. It’s probably two interesting things in my experience. One, which we can talk about in a second, it’s like how to pave the way for my interests and passion and tradition and learning. The other is more the entrepreneurial startup side. So when our family moved us back to the U.S., first generation, essentially what your family does is by necessity, they have to be like entrepreneurs. I got to get exposed to that whole side at a very young age, seeing all the ups and downs, seeing them start businesses, seeing some of them be successful, some of them fail.

To me, this is kind of like the early days of internet, that’s kind of what I thought was normal. I thought that’s what all families go through. So I kind of started developing a better understanding of small business and entrepreneurship at an early age, just seeing how much work goes into building companies and seeing how hard my parents worked to put food on our table.

Andrew: They had a gift store at the mall, seafood takeout store, other things, constantly. Why were they shifting so many stores? Why didn’t they just have one thing they did their whole careers?

Michael: Yeah. I think for them, it was most of the businesses they started were either like a business that existed they took over that they started. I just don’t think they ever scaled to where they could have been, nor do I think that was their ambition. It was just more about starting a company and that was the only place that would employ them, essentially. They really had no choice.

Andrew: You told our producer, “I’ll be open with you. I had a bunch of ideas for my family for what they could do. We implemented them and none of them worked.” What was it about your ideas at the time that didn’t work? Obviously, you’ve gotten better as an entrepreneur. What was it about the early attempts that weren’t so good?

Michael: I was like 12 or 13, like 14 years old. Some of it could be like pricing. Some of it could be a new product, testing things here and there. I was just very young and I was just very inexperienced. A lot of the businesses I started, they weren’t things I actually [inaudible 00:08:11]. I think just seeing that and just being exposed to that, I just learned so much, especially when you’re working there too.

Andrew: Yeah. I remember I worked in my dad’s store. My suggestions were always about how to add more computers to their store, and I realized it wasn’t going to sell them more. It was just going to cost them money. But I had a passion for adding more computers. This was before Square and all those other iPad-based options were available. It was just, “Let’s get a computer in here.”

The other suggestion was, “Let’s get the hell out of this business.” I hated going to my dad’s store and having to be there weekends. I hated that somebody always had to mind the freaking store. The day before Thanksgiving, you had to be there. The day of Thanksgiving, you’d have to be there. You never know when someone’s going to shop and if they just buy like $100 worth of stuff, that’s $100 you didn’t have.

Michael: Yeah. I definitely had that same experience. It was like nights and weekends and if they needed time off, it was on us to man the store while—at the same time, they’re working like 12, 14, 16 hours a day. So just to see how much hard work goes into it—

Andrew: That too. For me, my family was part of the Middle Eastern group of people who had opened stores up in the ghetto of New York. They worked hard. They would do like 10-hour days. Then these Koreans would come in fresh from Korea. These guys would work 12, 14-hour days. It was really just impossible to compete with someone who would work that hard in their store and whose family wouldn’t bitch and moan like we did about showing up to the store, and ultimately those guys ended up winning and the people of my dad’s generation ended up having to move on to something else. That’s just an insane amount of hours, though.

Michael: I definitely learned that from my parents. A lot of people asked me where I get a lot of grit and resilience, it’s definitely my parents, for sure.

Andrew: So you had this experience in school that kind of led you to a love for learning, that led you then to create Skillshare. I want to just talk about one story that happened that gives us a sense of what education was like for you. You had this professor who walked into the classroom, introduced himself and then he said, “Your first assignment is gum.” Then what did he do after he said gum?

Michael: He walked out. That was it.

Andrew: That’s it?

Michael: That was it.

Andrew: What are you supposed to do with that?

Michael: I have no idea. It was our first class. It was the first day of school. It was the first class with this pretty iconic teacher. He helped create the brand Nike. The class he was teaching was just on creative thinking. He walks in and he walks out. Essentially, what we end up learning is every week, he would give you a prompt and you had one minute to present anything. You could do anything you wanted. Obviously, the more creative the better.

I remember pretty vividly that first class, people made sculptures, people invented gum. Someone made a 60-second video about gum. I think him giving us just enough guidance but without too much handholding was really helpful. I remember the first couple of days, everyone’s asking each other, “What are we supposed to do?” And people are like, “Screw it. Let’s go make something and create something. It’s a creative class.” But the flip side of that class is you would present for a minute and he would tear you apart for a minute.

Andrew: Why was that helpful for him to tear you apart for a minute.

Michael: Because ideas were pretty terrible. He would be very blunt about them and give you very direct feedback. He was right most of the time and giving you direct feedback. He was right most of the time. You just start developing a thick skin and developing the skin where you don’t fall in love with your ideas, you go back and you tinker again and come back with a stronger idea.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michael: That gets stronger and stronger. You just realize that ideas are a dime a dozen and you do need the feedback and collaborate to like—just that exercise is pretty transformative for me as a student.

Andrew: Okay. The idea for Skillshare came to you originally when you working with fourth and fifth graders and you were kind of frustrated about what?

Michael: I think I would say frustrated with the current education system. So pretty much any culture, especially Korean culture was all about school. Everything was about education. Everything I did was around getting into a great school.

Once I graduated, it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. It wasn’t really what I expected because I spent half my life working so hard. Then right around Hurricane Katrina, I moved to New Orleans and volunteered at a charter school and I kind of saw that same determination. This time, it was with a bunch of fourth and fifth graders and their goal was very similar to mine, which was go to school and graduate and your life will change, you’ll become successful.

So I kind of, one, got frustrated with that. Also, I really enjoyed working with them, and I really saw the power of education. We had an 80% dropout rate, which is insane. We tried to turn that into 80% college graduation rate. But we realized working with a bunch of fourth graders, we’d have to wait 10 to 15 years to see the impact. That’s when I started thinking about my own personal experience. I saw the power of it and how it could change lives. Could we do that on the internet on a much bigger scale faster. That’s when I started thinking about the idea behind Skillshare.

Andrew: Here’s the part that shocks me about you as a person. You sound so entrepreneurial. You come from a family where entrepreneurship was part of life and you go to class and school where you’re pushed beyond your boundaries to do what you want. Still, you confess to our producer, you said, “Look, I felt that I wasn’t ready to be an entrepreneur. I needed an MBA in startups. I needed to do something.” Why did you feel that way? Why did you feel like you weren’t ready?

Michael: So I’ve always been pretty entrepreneurial. I also didn’t want to work on the wrong thing. I was watching and observing other people that were working on ideas that never really amounted to anything, just spinning in circles. I wanted to learn. I was very hungry. So, after New Orleans, I lived in New York. I worked at a startup called Behance with a guy named Scott Belsky, who’s now a partner at Benchmark. I wanted to learn because I knew that when I started my company, I wanted it to be really successful.

But the other side of it is I never worked in tech. I used computers my entire life, but I never knew how to build a website. I didn’t know what it meant to build a platform. I had an opportunity to work directly for the founder as employee number five and learn how to do everything. I would say that experience is directly attributed to the success of me as an entrepreneur in Skillshare, for sure.

Behance was one of those unique opportunities where there are very few websites per era that actually hit network effects and work. I always tell a lot of students you can learn a lot from failing, but I think you can learn 10x more by being somewhat successful. A lot of people underestimate the experience you get working in a place that’s successful and being able to punch above your weight and take on more responsibility and learn. I feel like I’ve learned what most people learn 10 years at a failing startup in one year at a successful one.

Andrew: I see. So where I might be dismissive of that and say these are imposter syndrome thoughts, you’re saying, “Actually, it led to something really useful.” You learned a lot by working for Behance. That’s an incredible company, an incredible group of people to be a part of. I think you also worked at Facebook, if I remember that.

Michael: I worked at another company called Hot Potato that ended up getting acquired by Facebook. So I went from Skillshare to Hot Potato, got recruited there to lead the product team. At Behance I was the jack of all trades. I did everything. They had a really good product. I had an opportunity to lead the product team. There’s a lot more responsibility to focus in one area. We got acquired by Facebook. Then the idea, the idea for Skillshare was kind marinating for me and I felt it was the right time.

Andrew: And you met Malcolm Ong—am I pronouncing his last name right?

Michael: Yeah. I met Malcolm just throughout the New York tech scene. Yeah. We would always just meet up and grab dinner and talk through idea and talk about product. I would say we did the founder dating thing for one to two years before we started the company.

Andrew: One to two years. One of the things that he added that you did too to the conversation was a couple of personal rules. You were going to start this business. One rule had to do with coding. What was that?

Michael: So one rule was around coding. We could build—between his skill set and mine, we could build anything, but we didn’t want to build a product that no one used. When I worked at Behance, we did launch a product that no one used and we spent nine months building it. We put a financial cap on what we would spend on the company. Within those two constraints, it just made us laser focused on customers, like we were so focused on customer development that I think that attributed a lot to the early formation of the company.

Andrew: So you created Eventbrite events. You taught the programs yourself. One of the first classes that you taught was what?

Michael: Playing poker. I was a competitive poker player. If you go to Skillshare1.Eventbrite.com, I think you can see all the first classes.

Andrew: I remember this part of your story partially because Fred Wilson is an investor and he’s so vocal and was much more so in the beginning about Skillshare and what he’s talked to you guys about. I actually don’t see that. No, I do see it, Play Poker Like the Pros.

Michael: What we were trying to validate, we talked to a lot of people and the number one consensus of why Skillshare would not work is that people can’t teach. You have to go to school. Teaching is very hard. So we just wanted to prove out that anyone can teach and people would actually sign up. That’s the only thing that we focused on for the first six months.

Andrew: Can someone who’s good at something like poker teach it and will someone go and learn from that person?

Michael: And pay for it.

Andrew: Now, in New York, Learning Annex was huge for a long time. They essentially had that. But they didn’t want the average person—I guess they did. They were okay with the average person teaching in some cases. What they wanted, especially was like Howard Stern’s producer to talk about how to produce a radio show. They wanted the person who had the name to teach the thing, partially so that people could go and gawk at these minor celebrities. Was that at all an inspiration?

Michael: No. So Learning Annex wasn’t an inspiration. It was a company that existed at the time. Like for us, huge believers in decentralization and platforms. So we wanted to turn every single city into a campus and every address into a classroom, every single person into a teacher and student. You could layer that in to pretty much every square foot in the world, it turns the whole world into a big school.

Andrew: I see.

Michael: But creating a vision—tons of challenges.

Andrew: So you were thinking, “Andrew’s got this office here. Why doesn’t Andrew start inviting people into the office to teach about how to do interviews, to teach about how to—got it. It didn’t work. We’re going to talk about it in a second.

First, let me talk about my first sponsor. It’s a company called HostGator. I feel like I’ve got to sneeze, but it’s not coming out, so I’m just going to go right through.

Here’s the thing, I’ll be honest with you Michael—every time I talk about HostGator or frankly, any hosting company, man, are people so religious about their hosting companies. Do you feel that strongly, like if I asked you what your hosting company was, would you be up and arms if I told you there are others out there? You don’t seem like it.

Michael: No. I’m all for just simplicity.

Andrew: Right. The two things that people get passionate religiously about, it’s the CRM they use and then the hosting company. Both of my sponsor today, one is a hosting company and the other is a CRM. But here’s the deal, guys—look, if you’re listening to Michael tell his story, one of the things that should stand out to you is that he just started with as basic a thing as possible. He didn’t recreate Eventbrite so that he could validate his idea and get his original customers. He just said, “Eventbrite is up there. I’m going to go with it.”

The other thing that should stand out for you is what he learned in school, where if you have the openness, the freedom to experiment in that classroom, like that classroom where the professor walked in and said gum, when you get the opportunity to experiment with no penalties but failure, good things come out and more than that, you stretch your creative muscles.

So what I’m going to encourage is anyone who’s listening who has an idea, I want you to take it to HostGator.com/Mixergy and just go implement. For a few bucks a month, you’re going to have a canvas that you can put anything on. And if you don’t have an idea at all, I’m going to urge you to go into HostGator.com/Mixergy, just sign up for their basic package and experiment with installing WordPress on it with one-click install and give yourself a canvas that you’re going to challenge yourself to fill up with something. I don’t know what it could be. It could be—look at one of your ideas, Michael. You started something called WorldSeriesOfGood.com years ago. That site is down, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Andrew: It was this idea that people playing poker should donate part of their winnings to a good cause. That’s a fantastic idea. You raised over $150,000 from what I see here online, from really big people like Phil Ivey. There’s a thing that can happen when you have a blank canvas and the willingness to experiment with it. For me, I just have the ability to go install WordPress really easily. I installed it. I said, “What if I start doing interviews?” And I started doing interviews and boom, it became a passion project that’s now gone on for almost ten years.

So when you go to HostGator—I do not get paid any extra if you go from the higher-level program or the low-level program, I should be encouraging you to go for the cheapest option out there. Instead, I suggest you go for the second cheapest option. It’s called the baby plan. The reason is one simple thing—unlimited domains. That means that you can keep installing WordPress on tons of different sites. Come up with an idea on Monday, be okay with it not going anywhere by Thursday and then Friday, come up with another idea, give yourself the room to experiment.

And when you go sign up at HostGator.com/Mixergy, you’re going to get unmetered disk space, unmetered bandwidth. They’re going to give you tons of templates, 4,500 to be exact, 4,500 templates so you can easily design your site. They’re even going to give you $100 AdWords offer and $50 search credit with Bing and Yahoo, which means they’re going to make it easy for you to get the word out about your site. Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. I promise—in fact, I don’t even have to promise. They guarantee that you’re going to love it. If you don’t love it, they’ll give you your money back.

Okay. Coming back to the story, Michael, you had this idea. The thing was starting to take off. People are actually going into your Eventbrite program. What about teaching teachers? I’ve found that it’s hard to get people to teach what they know. How did you get them to teach what they know?

Michael: Yeah. We spent a lot of time in the early days teaching teachers how to teach. We worked with every single teacher. We also worked with—we were like a community manager on the student side. We kind of just helped teachers teach. The way we did that, we focused a lot on what their skill sets were, they’re passionate about. We started creating our version of a playbook anyone can use to teach. It was a really simple organization system. We worked with them as a thought partner to help them think through and structure their outline. It worked fairly well.

Andrew: You would give them their outline, you would coach them individually and then whatever you learned by coaching them would go into the playbook.

Michael: I would call this phase—we rolled our sleeves up and brute forced it. Most of the teachers, we designed the curriculums with them. We did most of the legwork. We didn’t wait for people. We just kind of nudged them. That turned into a flywheel and then other people started to do it and then we built a platform and other people did it on their own and then started to grow from there.

Andrew: What’s the flywheel part of this? What’s the part that goes on its own? Not today, but the stage that we’re talking about right now.

Michael: The two-sided network effect. So we realized the biggest constraint was on the supply side, which are teachers. If we could get teachers who bring the demand side, then some of those people would end up teaching and the flywheel would start spinning. The faster that spun, the bigger we got and the more powerful the platform became as well as it got bigger.

Andrew: Every teacher had an incentive to tell their friends to come watch, to tell their audience to come watch and participate. You guys would help them get more people to your program because you had this group of learners in each city. That worked well in New York. You then came to San Francisco. Did you raise money next, or did you go to Boston?

Michael: We raised money before we launched in New York. Then we did New York and then SF. We did Boston, which was okay. Then one week training spun out of Boston. That’s when everything kind of started [inaudible 00:26:06].

Andrew: Raising money, hard or easy?

Michael: I think it’s always hard. Maybe some rounds are easier than others or maybe raising portions of it are easy. It’s always pretty challenges with the rare exception that if you’re in crypto, it’s pretty easy right now, but outside of that, it’s always very tough.

Andrew: So how did you get money from—why don’t we go to Fred Wilson? I read him talk about you guys a lot. He is a marquee name as an investor. What did you do to raise money from them?

Michael: So, in the early days, it was really hard because this is pre-startup boom. There weren’t a lot of education companies and most investors weren’t touching education because they got burned in the previous era. So Chris Dixon actually led our seed round.

Andrew: He did?

Michael: We got to Chris Dixon because a guy named Zach Klein, who started Vimeo, recruited me to go work at Hot Potato. So he already kind of saw me go through that and was asking me to walk him through this idea. He loved it. He kind of became our biggest advocate and brought Chris Dixon in. That gave us enough capital to build the first product, launch in those three cities. While we were doing that, a lot of our growth was accelerated. That’s when Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger came in along with Smart Capital to do our series A. All this happened in less than a year. So it happened very, very fast.

Andrew: Wow. Okay. Chris Dixon was, especially at the time, one of the best early stage investors. I think when I interviewed him, I researched him and he had the best track record at the time. I get it. Then you had the money to start in New York. You moved to San Francisco. What happened in Boston? It sounds like Boston was much more painful than I ever realized for you guys?

Michael: I wouldn’t say any of the cities were painful. What it really came down to, the model didn’t work. It scaled pretty fundamentally.

Andrew: What do you mean? Here’s what you told our producer. You said, “We expanded to Boston and everything fell apart, leading to the trough of shit for the next three years.” I like that openness, by the way, but put some flesh on that. What happened.
Michael: So it wasn’t really about like Boston. It was more about the model was working and then it just broke. What we realized—when I say it was in Boston, at that point, we probably had a year to 15 months’ worth of data. If you kind of started looking at the metrics and modeling out what the business could look like, there’s a huge fundamental flaw, which is if your local marketplace or platform, neither one the high price with low frequency or you want like high frequency, low price.

So Uber is a great example. People use Uber all the time. It’s like $10, $15. But we’re like $25 a class and people use us every three months. We’re taking pretty low transaction fees. I think it’s like 10% or 20%. You do the math, it just doesn’t scale.

Andrew: I see.

Michael: It was less about Boston. At that point, we were planning to expand aggressively. The early data started coming in from New York. We had about a year’s worth of data and just realized that New York is the most dense city in the U.S. that this model would work and that was the best you could do. Even if you optimize it more, it wouldn’t have been that much better. The math just didn’t work out, where at scale it would have been a profitable business.

Andrew: Why didn’t you increase the price? I’m thinking about going to a comedy club. It costs more and they pack more people in. Why didn’t you say we’re going to double the price and see if that works? We’re going to charge a minimum of $75. That’s kind of a night of entertainment of value. We’ll get better at promoting it and copyrighting it and so on.

Michael: Because it was open. So the teachers priced it. We worked with them to try to increase the price, but it just never worked out. I would say that was a big reason. Innovation was another reason. Everyone did a lecture in front of the classroom. We looked at online as a whitespace for innovation. Then our mission—the mission was really around providing access to learning. We had people all around the world that wanted to take Chris Dixon’s class and they couldn’t because they weren’t in New York. So we thought online would allow us to fulfill our mission. So that’s when we decided to pivot the business and move it online.

Andrew: I want to spend a little bit more time. You obviously made the right decision and it worked, but I want to understand how you got to it and why you dismissed other ideas or why they weren’t a good fit. I’m looking at General Assembly. They have teachers that are practitioners, but they themselves pick and vet and then they have longer, more in-depth programs.

Why didn’t you go in that direction and say, “Not everyone should teach, some people are especially good at it. We’re going to partner with the ones who are the best, allow anyone to create a class for $25. The best of the best we’re going to pick. We’re going to charge more and offer more with them.” Why didn’t you go in the higher end direction?

Michael: That didn’t fulfill our mission. We didn’t want to restrict anyone from learning. So GA fits that high price with low frequency, right? I’m assuming it costs like $5,000 to $10,000 to enlist. You do that once in your life. It’s pretty restrictive to a lot of people. We ruled that out as an option because the mission for the company has stayed true since we started it. That allowed us to make a lot of these decisions pretty easily.

Andrew: I see. If you know you want to get as many as possible, increasing the price is not the answer. Keeping the frequency at three to four times a year is not the answer. It has to be something else and then the natural next step is that. I heard that Jamie Siminoff, who I knew in L.A. well and has now had a hit with Ring, he says that one of the reasons why Ring works well is that internally, they have a mission.

They’re not the doorbell company. They’re not the camera company. They’re the security company. So, if you give them an idea for a new type of use for a webcam, they turn it down unless it fills their mission of security. When you have a clear mission like that, it helps make decisions so easy that he thinks he has an unfair advantage.

Michael: Yeah. So, when you just ask the questions, having such a clear mission allows you to say no to so many ideas and narrow it down. So we didn’t have a lot of options from there. We did explore a lot of ideas, but moving online was just so obvious. We also looked at the strengths of the company. A lot of our background was in product engineering and content. We also looked at are we an operational real estate business, or are we like a product company and a tech company that can build a platform.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michael: We decided to go that route. So our mission aligned with our strengths and the opportunity and we just felt like online would have been a better fit for what we could achieve in the space.

Andrew: I get that. The other thing that strikes me is that people don’t want to learn on a monthly—no more frequently than a quarterly basis, which is a realization that I accept, but I’m a little disappointed by. I remember when I was in school, my friends would go out every week to watch a rock show, to watch a local band play, to go a dance club. I always thought as excited as you are by that, I get more excited when I learn a new skill.

When I walk away knowing how to negotiate, when I walk away knowing how to remember something, those are feelings that I get to not just enjoy in the moment, but take away for the rest of my life. If only all those educational programs could have some element of fun that the music shows, have, that would really be the show. If only people understood this, they would turn away from the comedy cubs and the rest and go for something more substantive and it’s disappointing that the world didn’t turn out that way.

Michael: This is human beings and all their best parts and worst parts.

Andrew: As I was saying it, I noticed you smile and I’m wondering do you smile because you recognize this or because you feel the dorkiness of it, which I feel today, the dorkiness of that thought.

Michael: I would say the former. Like you’re literally verbatim saying exactly what I would say. I always say the best investment anyone can make is in themselves.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michael: It is where you want to spend your time and where you’re going to make investment. And obviously, much like anyone else, I love going to comedy shows and having fun. At the same time, I love investing in myself. That also ties back to the mission. There are other people out there that are not in New York that now have access to internet.

Andrew: Right.

Michael: They can learn these skills and start a business and work in a company or change their lives. That is what kind of has motivated and inspired me to work on this as long as I have.

Andrew: So I pivoted from doing offline events where I would bring in speakers and I would interview them in person to online. I straddled both worlds for a while there, but for me, it was fairly easy. For you, you decided to straddle both worlds too. You kept the offline world going and you also did the online stuff. Why did you do that and how did that turn out. Let’s start with why did you do that. Why did you continue the in-person events while you went online?

Michael: Yeah. I think the big lesson from that experience is when you make a decision, you’re 100% or you’re zero. You can’t do 99%. So 99% is kind of like we’re making that decision, but we’re also going to do this other thing. Every moment since then, it’s always been binary, especially on big decisions. There’s no going down the middle because middle is great. It’s murky. You’re not really making a decision by doing that.

I think part of it is like 99.99%, you’re going online, but 0.01% was just like a safety net, like if that doesn’t work out, we still have this other thing. But in hindsight, that business wasn’t working out. What ended up happening is we had two different code bases. We had an in-person product engineering design team that was maintaining two websites. We had two communities. It was just a mess. I would even say today we’re still paying that tech debt.

Andrew: What do you mean by that, that to this day, you feel like you’re still paying the technical debt?

Michael: Just that we had two different code bases.

Andrew: It still exists on the site?

Michael: It still exists in some fashion, like most of it’s gone now, but what we should have done is kind of what ClassPass did, right? So, before that, they were called Classtivity, completely deleted that business, rebranded and came out with ClassPass. I think that was a great lesson to pivot your business. Also, a lot of users were confused, like, “Is this a local business?” and we had this online thing. Every experience insight has always been you have to make a big decision, you have to make it with a lot of conviction and you go on with it.

Andrew: I didn’t realize that ClassPass was Classtivity. That was a Techstars company. So Techstars has a huge win in them.

Michael: Yeah. It was called Classtivity. It was also local. But it was more of a local marketplace for classes. We’re planning on working with them. It was basically like a Kayak for classes. They picked up on what we had, which was frequency and price. They realized a subscription model would work better online, like Skillshare, the online version.

Andrew: I see. There it is, 2013. This isn’t even that long ago. 2013, there’s a TechCrunch article about them. Classtivity launched out of Techstars back in June of last year with the promise to connect New Yorkers with any leisure or fitness class they could imagine with expert reviews, price information, classes, schedules, etc.

It turns out, finding a class isn’t as difficult as actually going to a class, which is why most fitness-based business models revolve around packages. So their next transition was to a subscription model, and only after that didn’t really work did they switch from Classtivity to a brand new product, which is a subscription that gives you access to a number of classes. That’s interesting. I didn’t connect it at all.

Okay. Let me take a break here and then talk about now that you found your thing, how did you get it to take off? How did you get in a world where, frankly, online classes are everywhere now and they always were? The last four or five years, they were everywhere. You could go to YouTube and find them. How did you guys get customers? How did you get them to commit to a monthly fee, etc.?

First, I’ve got to tell everyone about a company called Pipedrive. Again, many people are going to say, “I have my own CRM. I love it.” Whatever your CRM is, I’m not going to tell you guys to turn away from it. What CRM do you use personally? I shouldn’t be talking about it in an ad for Pipedrive, but let me hear what you’re using, Michael. I’m curious. Do you use a CRM?

Michael: I actually don’t really use a CRM, but this sounds like a pretty good product.

Andrew: I’ll be honest, privately, the best CRM that I found is the stinking thing that comes with my iPhone. If I’m talking to someone, immediately after I’m done, I like to go into my iPhone notes and just write a note about them. Then I can come back the next time I talk to them, when I look for their phone number I see they’re moving houses. My first question, so I can act like a human being before getting into business is, “Hey, how’s the move going?”

Then they tell me whatever else is going on with their kids’ lives and then I write it down and come back. That’s not the kind of CRM that Pipedrive is. Frankly, there are tons of different CRMs for that kind of application and the one in your phone might just be the best that you can use for it. Here’s where Pipedrive is really good. It’s only good for this.

If you have a set of processes or want to have a set of organized processes for closing a sale, Pipedrive excels in that. They are focused on that and they require that and if you say, “I want to pay you. Can I do other stuff with it?” They’re going to say, “You can do whatever you want, but frankly, it’s not going be good. Keep your money.” They focus on that. As soon as anyone who’s listening to me or even you, Michael, decide that you’re going to sign up for Pipedrive, as soon as you get in, one of the first things they’re going to tell you, maybe even the first thing they’re going to tell you to do is write down the steps that it takes from taking a stranger to closing them as a customer.

What are those steps? Each one of those steps gets its own column. Then they say, “Okay, find a potential customer, create a card and we’re going to put that card for that potential customer in the left-most column.” And then we’re going to kind of nag you until you take your next step until you close the sale and every time you take a step, you move the card one column to the right, you get the satisfaction and you get to see that people are moving and progressing towards a sale and if you’re doing it individually, congratulations, it’s going to work for you. You’re going to see more sales.

But if you’re starting to hire other people to help with your sales team, you can say to them like I do, “Hey, I need you to help me with column number three. That’s not something that’s a real sales task. It’s just a follow up process. You’re in charge, Samantha, of column number three. Steve, you’re in charge of column number seven because that’s more of a technical thing and I want you to follow up with them and show them that we have a team here.” Then you start assigning a column to other people.

Beyond that, you get stats. I like it as a team leader here at Mixergy that I get to see stats on how other people on my team are performing. Are they actually closing sales? Are they moving deals down the pipeline? Are they just lazy or are they actually just afraid of making calls? I need to know the stats and then I came get on a call with them and say, “What’s going on here?”

If that’s the kind of mindset that you guys have out there, anyone who has it, I urge you to do what so many people at Mixergy have done and that is go and just try it. Go play with the freaking thing. Go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy and it’s going to force you to create your process. Here’s what I’m going to suggest when you do it—don’t create the best process. Don’t create the right process. Start with the theory of what your process is of closing sales and then start adding people to it and when things don’t work.

When you realize, “After I send someone an invitation, I should follow up,” create another column called follow up. My friend Noah Kagan says that he gets 50% of all of his sales with the follow up email. The first email gets ignored, 50% of the sales come because he sends a follow up email. You hear something like that, add another column to your sales process, follow up with people who don’t respond.

Go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. They’re going to give you 14 days free, 25% off for three months thereafter, frankly, they shouldn’t even have to give you 25% off, their price is super low. They’re a company that really should be doubling prices—Pipedrive.com, really good software. It’s one of those things that if anyone signs up for it, I know they’re going to say, “Andrew is helpful in my life.” For the next ten years, they’re going to say that. Good for me.

Now, you have this whole online thing. How do you get anyone to come—how do you justify online? I’m a little hung up on this. In a world where so much is free, when you’re going to your investors, when you’re talking internally, how do you say, “We’re going to do an online thing when you look around and see that people are teaching for free?”

Michael: Yeah. I think that’s when you start really thinking about what is going to be our mode. What’s our differentiation? That’s essentially how we start to develop our strategy. We said we wanted to create a [inaudible 00:43:36]. We wanted to create an open platform. So, quickly, the only way we can learn those skills is someone else can teach them as quickly as they’re popping up in the world. So even though there’s a luxury free content out there, we felt we would have the most cutting edge.

Second is quality. So, on one end of the spectrum, we had YouTube, that’s free, and on the other end, we might have college. We felt there’s always a need for someone to learn those skills and not have to waste a lot of time searching for the traditional [inaudible 00:44:06]. We just wanted to pack in as much value into subscriptions. So we didn’t want anyone to say that I didn’t learn anything that changed my life.

Andrew: So I get that. Now, do you do the same thing you did when you had an offline marketplace, which is focus on the creators and know that when you have a lot of creators, more people are going to come in?

Michael: Yeah. We focused on the supply side again, and we essentially did the same thing all over again. So it’s just a lot of [inaudible 00:44:40], roll your sleeves up and just one by one, get the teachers on the platform. So you just start with like 10 teachers and grew to 20 to 50 and now we’re at 5,000 teachers on the platform. It started small, but then it starts getting bigger and bigger.

Andrew: I see. I was checking out a water paint class. The woman who put it on, I have no idea whether she put it on today, last week or two years ago. It’s always going to be relevant and once you have that on, you have another class that’s offered. She always makes money based on how many people watch her class, right? So you get a bunch of creators. What was your best source for finding creators and getting them to actually create these programs?

Michael: Just reaching out to them. We could have used Pipedrive back then, but we’d go online and find people that were very interesting, had a following, maybe reach out to them and then same thing. We worked with them on the curriculum and help them teach. Rather than helping them find a space, we’d help them with video. We’d put on a platform and then we’d market it out. That would start bringing the students and the two sides started—every time that happens, there’s one flywheel that spins, the first time you try to spin it, it’s a lot of work. Over time, it gets easier and easier.

Andrew: Because they have an incentive to promote it. Here’s the thing. It’s not a direct revenue—I hate to mention your competitors, but I want to understand this space really well, so I’ll be open. Udemy also has a similar program, where anyone can teach. If you sell a class on Udemy, you get the money that people pay for your class and there’s a direct incentive to promote the class.

Here, I might be recommending that people come take my class, so I send them into Skillshare. They sign up for a Skillshare account. They watch five minutes of my class or they get distracted and don’t even do that and then they end up watching, I don’t know you guys have Seth Godin on. You guys have the Buffer people on. You have a bunch of others. Then they end up getting all the money and I made the referral and I sent them into Skillshare. So isn’t that a challenge?

Michael: Well, there’s a couple things. One is when you think about our competitors, we feel that at the end of the day, it’s just digital content. It’s an mp4 file. On the internet, anything that’s worth the marginal cost of distribution at zero, the price hits some type of floor. So while we do have a lot of competitors that are doing our model, I would say there was a time where people charged $1,000 for an online course. Now everything is on sale for $5, $10 and pretty soon, those prices will drop too because I don’t think consumers have been willing to pay that, especially there are other platforms like Skillshare, which is more a Spotify and iTunes model, especially in digital content.

Our platform is like different from our competitors in a way where if you do bring a student, you do get paid. You do get $10 for referring a new subscriber, but for teachers, we just want them to focus on teaching. So there are a lot of people out there that don’t have a huge online following and you do send them a lot of students. Seth Godin is not our most successful teacher. He’s our most famous one, but we have teachers that are making $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month that were unknown that just happen to be really great teachers.

Andrew: I’m assuming those guys are also teaching software, that when there’s software to learn, there are businesses that will send their people in to go learn that, right?

Michael: Not necessarily. We have classes with [inaudible 00:48:11]. We have software classes. Our top teacher is like an animator. The reason is it’s a very niche market. That information is not widely available. He’s a great, phenomenal teacher, very active with his students and community and as a result, he’s very, very successful. We have other teachers that are teaching, let’s say someone in software, the guy was engaging, the content is really dry and they don’t do as successful.

Andrew: I see.

Michael: If you’re teaching a class and somebody can’t pay attention, maybe you should think of a different way to teach or make it more engaging.

Andrew: For the original person who’s sending someone in, they get $10. So they don’t even have to count on someone taking their class as long as it’s a brand new potential customer, brand new person, send them over, say, “Go check out my class on Skillshare.” The person signs up to take the class. If they watch five minutes, they get distracted, there’s still a $10 commission.

Michael: Yes. And the cool part of our business today, it’s a real slow start, but once it hits scale, it becomes more powerful. As the subscription pool gets bigger, there are more payouts to teachers who can take bigger bets on getting much bigger [inaudible 00:49:27] very similar to Netflix. We can create our own original content if we wanted to. So it does become more powerful—

Andrew: Did you start creating your own original content?

Michael: We do. I think we make a couple classes a month right now. But for us, we’re looking to start working with bigger names now because, obviously, we have a much bigger royalty pool with our subscriptions and we feel more confident with it.

Andrew: I think there are a couple of reasons why someone would do it. Say Tim Ferriss has a brand new book out. He’s a name that would attract new students and get existing students to go watch him. He wants to promote the ideas in the book. If you make it easy for him to be on your platform and teach, his number one thing is that now more people get exposed to his content, especially if they’re learners who then eventually, some of them would go by the book—the secondary, and it’s probably not even a strong incentive is that he gets paid for people who watch the course. That’s the reason behind something like that, right?

Michael: For sure.

Andrew: Now, if he expresses an interest, do you guys say, “This is Tim Ferriss, he’s a celebrity. We’re going to help him by bringing him into a studio or help him by giving him more support?”

Michael: We definitely do that.

Andrew: What do you do? What’s your process for taking a Tim Ferriss and helping him out?

Michael: We have a content team, which consists of filmmakers, education, account manager, [inaudible 00:50:44], they would work with them figuring out what you want to teach, help them design it. We’re literally [inaudible 00:50:49] just at a much bigger scale.

Andrew: I see. There would be a space here in San Francisco. He would come in. . .

Michael: We mostly shoot on location. So, it goes back to your scenario where it’s a little bit more fun and inspirational. We can go to his apartment or follow him around.

Andrew: You send the videographers over. Do you guys put together the material based on his book? Do you help him put together the outline of what to talk about? By the way, that beep, beep was freaking Siri. I don’t know what I said that suddenly made Siri wake up, but I want to go back and hit rewind to see how startled I was by that.

Okay. So now I get a sense of how the business works. Let me see what else I didn’t talk about. We talked about the flywheel. We talked about how you guys produced content and how you helped people produce content. What else helped you get people in the door? Beyond the teachers themselves promoting their class, I’m looking through SimilarWeb to get a sense of where you guys are getting traffic and I don’t see where it is. Where are people coming in? How are people discovering Skillshare?

Michael: That’s our secret sauce. No, I’m just kidding. I would say it’s a little bit of everything. Every single channel we tested, we optimized and we added a new one. Early days, [inaudible 00:52:11]. Then we launched student referrals, so students referring. SEO started kicking in and then we started having a social following and working with partners and influencers and then we started doing podcast advertising. It’s like you keep adding more and more channels and they start all working together.

Andrew: What’s your framework for that? It sounds like what you’re saying is very similar to Gabriel Weinberg, the guy from DuckDuckGo, his book, “Traction.” It seems like that.

Michael: Early days, that book was pretty impactful. We did have the bullseye strategy, where we went all out on a few channels and one of them worked really well. Now that we have a full marketing team, it’s kind of like they’re testing everything.

Andrew: I see. In the beginning, it was let’s make a list of all the possible things that we could do. Let’s figure out what is most likely to work for us. Let’s experiment and then cut if it doesn’t work.

Michael: Ours was all influencers.

Andrew: Influencers?

Michael: Yes. So we’ve always had a very strong influencer strategy. So we had it on the teaching side, and then we helped people [inaudible 00:53:15] we realized we built such a great brand that a lot of influencers wanted to associated their brand with ours.

Andrew: So I read your Medium post, the one titled “Passing the Baton,” where you say, “I’m not going to be the CEO anymore. Our COO is going to take over. I’m the guy who helped start the company, the zero to one, start from nothing and get it to something.” Now someone else who can grow the company needs to take over. I get that. I’m also sensing that beyond that, there’s a personal reason why you want to step back. Talk to me about the personal side of the decision to not be the CEO of this company that you founded and worked so hard on?

Michael: For me, it’s kind of like I read an article by Reid Hoffman about him moving into a similar role. Obviously, LinkedIn is much bigger than Skillshare. It was a pretty objective decision based on if you think where the company needs to go and where my strengths are, they didn’t really overlap, and I also felt like what the company really needs right now is someone with a very strong operational background and experience that can kind of help scale and get it to where it needs to go.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be the CEO in the future or I’m stepping the way, it just needs a different skill set to get where he needs to go. In order for me to make that decision, it’s a lot of self-reflection. This is my baby. I’ve been working on it seven years. But I think that the right decision was, especially to get to where we want to go the next three years, it was definitely a different person needed.

Andrew: So, personally, what are you going to be doing. What’s next for you? What’s next for Michael?

Michael: I’m still day-to-day at Skillshare. Right now, we’re fundraising, so that consumes a lot of my time. We’re launching new products. So I’m kind of in charge of all the new products launching, which is fun because it feels like an early-stage startup. And then whatever projects come up, they’re there. So I’ll do things like this. But it gives me a lot more free time to be a lot more creative and innovative and just think about one, how to grow a business, and how you can continue to innovate, which aligns with my sweet spot and where my strengths are and what I actually enjoy doing and [inaudible 00:55:36].

Andrew: I do feel like online learning could use a rethought. We’re still doing video the way that people used to do teaching. There isn’t—you know where I saw more innovation for a while and now it seems a little flat is in coding. Coding is always about, “I’m going to teach you. You’re going to do it. You’re going to see that it’s not working and we can keep updating.” I always thought that Mixergy would add more to it, that it wouldn’t be a person teaching at students. I’m sensing that you’re playing around with that. I think Mavericks is a program like. Talk to me about that.

Michael: Yeah. So it’s one of the new products that came out of Skillshare is one that I’m leading. Yeah. It’s very different. So it’s 100% free. There are no teachers. There are no classes. Everything is project-based. Everything is peer to peer. We started with three programs, one around product design, launching data science. We’re launching that next month. Let me rephrase that and say Q1. The idea is if you have access to internet and can learn these skills and get a job and start a business or graduate. There should be no limitations on financials. We do want 95% of people to drop out because we don’t want it to be easy.

Andrew: The innovation there is free, but it’s more than that. It’s also about the length of the program and other things, right?

Michael: I think the biggest innovation there that catches a lot of people off guard is there are no classes. There are no teachers. There are no traditional educational pedagogy.

Andrew: I thought the way I would do it is not me, but a student would learn by doing little projects, right?

Michael: Yeah. The whole experience is project-based. It’s very similar to gum, right? The teacher walks in, says gum and walks out. But imagine that over 20 to 30 projects that teach you from a product design. A great example for that is one of the first projects in that program is design for [inaudible 00:57:48] and it helps you get a website [inaudible 00:57:52]. I’ll tell you that you’re going to have to go search the web, search Skillshare. Talk to some of our students and figure out how to design it.

Andrew: I see. This is an innovative approach to it. I can see now why you would have a discord channel where people can go and talk and I can see how this is different and I can see why you’d call it Mavericks. Where’s the revenue? How is this helping your business?

Michael: We’re still thinking through that side, but we’ll charge companies to have access to the graduates. That way we can keep it free for students. In New York, a great example, we just moved into a new office. It was free for us. His incentive was just find us a space that we wanted. We knew all of our incentives were aligned and we hoped to do that for students as well. We hoped to do that for students as well.

Andrew: What do you mean it was free, because the building paid for it?

Michael: In New York, for office, companies don’t pay their brokers, the building does. So he showed us around, he help negotiate the lease. We hope to do the same for students. When they graduate, if they get an opportunity from Skillshare, from some of our hiring partners, we’ll do career coaching, mentorship, also negotiate it so they don’t get underpaid. We’ll set them up to be successful, and then we’ll charge the companies to hire the graduates.

Andrew: I see. That makes sense again. I feel like that’s an innovation that came from the coding schools and the coding schools in many ways have a lot to teach us. I know at one point years ago you and Zach from Codeacademy got together for an event to talk through education. So I’m sure that you’re aware of what they’re doing and you’re influenced by it. What do you do when you’re not working? Let’s close it out with that.

Michael: Pretty standard stuff. I’d say I have a lot of hobbies, but I really enjoy spending a lot of time. I know if you’re [inaudible 00:59:45] spending time with people. I just spend a lot of time with people I care about.

Andrew: Doing what, going out for drinks?

Michael: It can be anything, having them over for dinner, catching up with them.

Andrew: Do you cook when you have people over for dinner?

Michael: Yeah. So I definitely cook a lot. But it’s really about spending quality time with people they cared because you realize those are the relationships that matter in life. It invests a lot into those.

Andrew: I used to do so much more of that before I had kids. Three years ago, I had kids and it’s a lot harder. I tried cooking because I thought it would feel more special to invite people to my house, especially interviewees—sorry?

Michael: It’s a lot of work.

Andrew: Yeah. I do the cooking. I thought it would be more special. I’ve got to tell you, people in our world don’t notice it. There’s not a single person that said, “Hey, Andrew, I’m impressed that you cooked.” Not that I’m looking for praise, I wanted to see that they’d noticed it. I don’t think there’s a single person that noticed it. I said screw that, I’ll just order food in. It’s still in my house. All they care about is there’s a closeness from having people in the house.

Michael: I think that sounds right. If you plate it, they might not even notice the difference.

Andrew: No, they don’t. What I did was before they came, I had the takeout put in pots and pans, so you don’t see all the takeout material everywhere. Then I also played up the fact it was takeout. I would do Sunday night takeout. Everyone come over to our house. We’re just going to order from the Indian place because Indian does a good vegetarian. We keep a vegetarian house. Boom. It’s great. I do enjoy that.

All right. Congratulations at what you’ve done with Skillshare. I’ve watched you guys from the outside. I’ve been so curious about what you did, why you did it, I learned a lot in this interview and hopefully they did too. If they didn’t, first of all, shame on them and second, they should go to—in fact, don’t go to Skillshare.com. Go to the App Store. Download the Skillshare app. They have a free trial period too.

So you don’t have to pay. You get 30 days to try it. Then apparently, you guys are going to pay $15 and I say suckers because I think I’m grandfathered in for $10 a month. Frankly, it’s all too cheap. I think you’re underpricing yourself because you’ve anchored yourself to Spotify, online education, I think, is worth so much more. It’s one of the best values out there. A freaking book, it blows my mind—I will, with a single book get a couple weeks’ worth of entertainment for $4 on the damn Kindle, $10?

Michael: Someone spent years of their life to have all this knowledge into something that is digestible for each consumer. It’s like all the knowledge you gain from one book is just amazing.

Andrew: Meanwhile, Olivia and I went out to a comedy club, it’s over $60 a night to go to the comedy club and we have to eat the crappy food because I can’t not eat food if I’m out. Last Friday, we went out to eat dinner somewhere. It wasn’t even dinner. We went to this interesting bar. I ordered food there. Really, crappy, oily fish and chips, $60 for what, an hour of good conversation, online education is still one of the best values out there, even at twice the price.

All right. Skillshare, guys. Don’t go to Skillshare.com. Go to Skillshare in your app store, get the app, try it for free. What have you got to lose? You’re going to see what online education could be like. Thank you all for listening to Mixergy, where we’re also, I think, paving the way to online education where you get to learn directly from entrepreneurs like Michael.

Finally, I want to thank my two sponsors. If you’re looking to host your site—frankly, I know I get better results when I promote this people who hate their hosting companies. I think I deliver more value to people who are not being creative who need a blank canvas to start a company, start a project and for you, I urge you to go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. once you sign up, you’re going to find yourself creating new websites and new ideas.

And if you want a CRM, not a CRM that’s the best in the world at everything but the CRM that’s going to force you through a process, but is focused on having end goal, which is closing a sale, go check out Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. Michael, thank you.

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